The Lethal Presidency: Obama's Age of Enlightenment

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After Barack Obama was elected on the sixth day of November, there was a moment of hopeful silence, on the issue of drones. No drone attacks were reported in Pakistan or anywhere else; David Petraeus endured notoriety not as a killer but as an unlikely Casanova; and for one magical two-week stretch, it seemed that the election had ushered in the president we all thought we elected four years ago, instead of the president who, three days after his inauguration, went determinedly about the business of becoming the Lethal one.

This week, however, has brought fresh revelations about the Lethal Presidency from beginning to end. First came the New York Timesreport that, in the days before the election, the White House prepared for the possibility of defeat at the hands of Mitt Romney by rushing to write down "rules" regarding targeted killing — by codifying its own approach to pre-emptive elimination.

Next came an interview, published by ProPublica, that contained the unsettling statistic that only 13 percent of the approximately 2,500 people killed by the Obama Administration "could be considered militant leaders," and the assertion that "most of the people who are killed don't have as their objective to strike the U.S. homeland." Next came a story that the Pentagon had published a report characterizing "the military significance of China's move into unmanned systems" as "alarming," even as a Chinese aerospace show featured those unmaned systems as its centerpiece. Next came the news that President Obama's electoral triumph had not, in fact, stayed his hand in regard to drone attacks — that, in fact, the day after he was re-elected, the Administration had killed an alleged al-Qaeda operative whose reputation for moving in plain sight prompted his fellow Yemenis to ask why he couldn't simply have been arrested.

Finally, on Thursday, there were reports that the Administration had resumed its killings in Pakistan, with a drone attack on a vehicle and a residential compound in Wana, the capital town in the tribal area of South Waziristan.

It was no surprise, then, that the week ended with a lead editorial in this morning's Times sternly urging the White House to continue developing "rules for targeted killing." Implicit in the editorial, however, was the odd and paradoxical sense of hope that Obama's re-election had kindled: the hope that the President's re-election had somehow provided him not with an excuse to keep killing people in secret but rather with an opportunity to bring his own power to heel.

This is not going to happen. This is not going to happen because everything we learned this week about how the Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama is proceeding into its second term confirms, to the letter, what we know about how the Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama conducted its first. Why did Obama Administration "rush" to develop rules for targeted killing in advance of a Romney Administration and then put aside that urgent task once it knew that it was staying in power? Because the Obama Administration regarded itself as morally superior to a Romney Administration, that's why — and because Barack Obama regarded himself as morally superior to Mitt Romney.

And it is that sense of moral superiority, rather than any set of "rules" he has developed, that has provided President Obama with the foundation for the Lethal Presidency.

It is that sense of moral superiority that has made the Lethal Presidency so expansive — that has allowed it to claim the war with al-Qaeda as justification for killing people, even though only an estimated 13 percent of those it has killed are Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders.

It is that sense of moral superiority that has allowed the Administration to spell out why it should be permitted to develop a prodigiously lethal drone program it won't formally acknowledge, and then to call the prospect of China doing the same "alarming."

And it is that sense of moral superiority that has made killing an option of first resort rather than last — that has somehow posited that killing is not only safer and more convenient than capture but also of higher legal and ethical value.

Barack Obama might very well be morally superior to Mitt Romney. He might very well have had reason to fear that Romney would inherit not just a prolific program of lethal operations but also a dangerously "amorphous" one.